ken a not strictly authorized kiss or two. What
Sir Galahad among men was proof against such a tripping in the presence
of lovely and irresistible temptation?...

"Hortense gave you no notice at all?" she demanded out of a dream.

"Did you ever? Why, honestly, Cally ..."

He was to pause once again, to bid the Paynes farewell, on his final
progress back to what he had once called lights and home. That would be
in April, said Cousin Willie Kerr, when his six months' sentence ran
out. The distant promise brought the girl no comfort now. Why, really,
should she not take this new opportunity he had given her, and dispatch
him a little note, saying in a friendly way that she had wanted to see
him again? By day after to-morrow, he could be at her side....

It was a little note that mamma, though ignorant of the circumstances,
had so specially recommended in the desolate weeks; had commanded,
offered bribes for, cried for with real tears, blustered and threatened
for with a purpling birthmark. In her own mind the girl had already
worded many which met the situation with merely a front of sweet
generosity, carrying no forfeiture of dignity, no real acknowledgment of
surrender. What was the fibre of foolish hardness in her that resisted
all mamma's importunities, all her own urgent wisdom?

"Five years ago," said Hen, "we paid eight dollars a month, and got
really good ones. Now the greenest of them holds you up for twelve and
fourteen. Hortense was simply bribed off...."

Cally roused, glancing about. "Papa says," she observed, absently, "it
will all end in something like the French Revolution. Heavens! What a
perfectly sickening street!"

"Isn't it?" said Hen, cheerfully. "Yet it's interesting too, Cally, for
this is where the city makes all its money."

Money-making, indeed, Canal Street looked. Long processions of trucks
rolled up and down it, giving motorists more time than they desired to
look about. All around them, as the car moved slowly on, were
warehouses, new and old cheek by jowl together; commission merchants,
their produce spilled over the sidewalk; noisy freight yards, with
spur-tracks running off to shipping-rooms of all descriptions;
occasional empty ground used as dumps, littered with ashes and old tin
cans; over all a thousand smells, each more undelectable than the last.

But _April_! You might as well say in another life. How could she ever
get through the days till then?...

"I'm glad you're int